Reviews

South Australian playwright Tracy Crisp’s stories of memory and family are so vivid and affecting in The Forgettory they stay with you long after the theatre lights fade.

Crisp, a South Australian novelist, made her playwriting debut with a show called Pearls at last year’s Fringe.

This new work reveals the depth of her talent; not only did she write The Forgettory but–under director Maggie Wood–she performs it herself, beautifully.

A monologue in four parts, Crisp, above, ranges over generations of her family while musing on life under four broad themes–insomnia, birth, death and dementia.

We’re right there when she struggles to sleep during the small hours in Abu Dhabi, holds her baby close before he undergoes surgery, gets tips from her grandfather on the art of photography, then watches as his most precious possession–his memory–falters with age.

Her reflections on growing up in SA bring the state to life in a way we don’t often see on stage, and while Crisp delivers her work with love and care, it never feels sentimental.

Add a sense of humour to keep you on your toes and the night is complete.

Monologue performances carry with them a unique degree of freedom to a performer. This one is presented in a relatively simple fashion (by director Ross Vosvotekas), with audio-visual elements utilised sparingly but effectively (by operator Bethan Maddison), and props deployed in a particularly poignant manner at times. The true strengths of Pearls are in the text by performer/producer Tracy Crisp (with acknowledgment to dramaturg Maggie Wood), and the gently humorous, engaging way she delivers it to us.

This is a tale of love and forgiveness, of parents and children, of taking chances, of growing up, moving out, moving on, coming home, and looking back, without letting grief triumph over us. The emotional significance of the title will only become fully apparent by the end, when it delivers a remarkable impact.

Crisp’s stage presence is quietly confident and skilful at touching on a wide range of emotions, as she generously opens out her life–and the lessons she’s learned from it–in a highly related manner, without the need for over performing, nor falling into the trap of simply narrating a script and forgetting stagecraft.

This show will appeal strongly to a broad audience, particularly, South Australians, and is an ideal choice to take your parents along to.

Review of Surrogate by Katharine England, The Advertiser, 20 January 2018

…both these novels–Adelaide writer Crisp’s second, Melbourne author Evans’s fourth–are highly topical and engaging. Crisp’s in particular you might be tempted to read at a sitting, for it moves rapidly between two time frames, concentrating on pivotal events and imbuing them with a strong local atmosphere …

Crisp’s novel neatly encapsulates some of the most emotive issues around motherhood, making them vivid and intense with personal and local detail: unmarried girls sequestered like slaves in a far-flung Finders Ranges town until their newborns cane be taken from them; an increasingly fraught private surrogacy arrangement between people who hardly know each other; a young woman who has mentally jettisoned fertility in favour of a beloved father-figure; an insecure older woman confronting breast cancer.

There are situations rife with opportunities for exploitation, extreme hurt and emotional blackmail, but most of Crisp’s characters treat one another with exemplary tenderness and care. There is much for Adelaide readers to recognise in Crisp’s largely wintry scenarios–the (old) Adelaide Hospital, Jetty Rd, The Parade, the Esplanade at Brighton, the local train network, Centennial Park cemetery–but there are also more general settings realised in the rich and intimate detail of texture, sense and smell. And (…) there is a telling moment of disclosure, a decision tensely awaited and satisfyingly revealed at the poignant climax of the book.

Adelaide’s Tracy Crisp has set her first novel in a fictional town very like Port Pirie, and though she is also a standup comedian as well as a writer, Black Dust Dancing is really no laughing matter.

The novel centres around two women. Caro is a doctor, the widow of Sean, a man from Port Joseph who has recently died, quite young, from an unspecified disease, in their Adelaide home. Caro has decided to move to Port Joseph with her fifteen-year-old daughter, to work in a general practice there and to try to develop a better relationship with her husband’s family, especially her mother-in-law Libby.

Heidi is younger, in her early twenties. She is about to marry into the same family. Her fiance, Joel, is Sean’s much younger brother. She lives with her father, since her mother abandoned them years ago, and her four-year-old son Zac, the result of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. At the beginning of the novel she and Zac are returning from an uncomfortable holiday with her mother in Queensland. Persuaded by her mother that Zac is not as healthy as he could be, Heidi consults Caro, who discovers that the boy’s lead levels are dangerously high.

The people in this small town don’t give up their secrets lightly, and silence is a lead weight in the closest of relationships. The narrative often proceeds by means of extended descriptions of the trivia of life–a trip to the hairdressers, a day spent doing housework–with a telling sentence or two dropped into the flow of banalities.

Reading Black Dust Dancing is a little like being at a large family gathering where you hardly know anyone and no-one introduces you. Nothing is ever explained, and we only find out about relationships–and they are tense and complicated in this small town–by eavesdropping on conversations and drawing implications from the though processes of the two main characters. For example, it seems probable that Sean’s illness is the same disease that is killing Zac’s grandfather, and it seems possible that it is linked to the high lead levels in the town, but nobody ever actually says that. And there’s Auntie Barb who was on the scene after Heidi’s mother left, but we don’t find out whether she was a real aunt, or whether Heidi’s obvious but muted resentment of her was caused by an attempt to introduce a mother-substitute. I assume that Crisp is firmly wedded to the creative writing dogma of ‘show don’t tell’, and though I don’t believe that creative writing necessarily has to follow these rules, and that any such rules can stifle creativity, it’s actually a highly effective technique in Crisp’s hands, because it engages the intellect as well as the emotions.

Black Dust Dancing could appear to be a fairly simply morality tale about the conflict between loyalty and making a principled stand. But it’s surprisingly deep and its economy and the lucidity of its language are stunning when you consider the complexities it contains.